Traditional entertainment devices for out-of-home use, for example in restaurants or bars, are typified by the jukebox that plays selected vinyl records or compact discs after the insertion of coins or paper currency.
A company may develop and market a particular entertainment device platform, which may be licensed to a manufacturer that manufactures the entertainment device. This device may be sold to operators who, in turn, form agreements with individual venues to locate an entertainment device at that venue. Patrons of the venue may operate the entertainment device to provide the desired content, such as to play a selected song or display a selected music video. In many cases, the entertainment device hardware is owned by the operator, who forms some sort of revenue agreement with the venue owner.
An operator may own large numbers of entertainment devices that are installed and operated in a widely dispersed geographic region. In the past, conventional jukebox operators would personally visit each venue in order to update the music selection and to monitor the number of song plays for each individual entertainment device. These operators would have “routes” they would travel regularly in order to visit, access, and update their various entertainment devices. Later, network-enabled entertainment devices were developed so that new music could be distributed by a central host system to the network-enabled entertainment devices without requiring a human operator to manually install new storage media (e.g., vinyl records or compact discs). The operator was able to remotely select music or other entertainment content to be downloaded for local storage on the jukebox. The system administrator at the host system may create configuration and software updates for each of the entertainment devices. The host system may then inform each entertainment device that new files are available for download and installation.
Early network-enabled jukeboxes utilized modems and telephone lines in order to make network connections with the host system to download new music and other files used to operate the jukebox. Typically, these modem-enabled jukeboxes would dial into the host system at a certain time each day in order to download any necessary files. These files may include entertainment media files to be locally stored so that they may be performed upon request by consumers, advertising-related files used to attract consumers to the jukebox and to encourage them to purchase entertainment content, and operational files used to control the operation of the jukebox. This downloading was typically performed when the venue was closed for business so as not to interrupt service to customers and thereby reduce revenue. Unfortunately, this would provide a limited window of time during which files could be transferred over the network connection. Even when broadband connections to the jukeboxes became economically feasible for these venues, there still remained a limited amount of bandwidth that could be utilized at any particular time. When large files, such as video files, major software updates, or large album orders, were to be downloaded, the broadband connection may be fully consumed for extended periods of time.
Accordingly, it may be desirable to provide an entertainment system that can efficiently and effectively download files with minimal impact on the consumer experience.